American Museum of Natural History

The museum was founded in the years after the Civil War and rose on what was then the northern edge of the developing city, on land the museum shares with the surrounding park. Over more than a century it grew building by building into the sprawling complex of today, its architecture ranging from Victorian brick to a Beaux-Arts memorial hall to the modern glass of the Rose Center and the newest science wing.

It grew alongside the great age of scientific expeditions, and much of its collection came from field work across the globe, gathered by explorers and scientists the museum sent out. That history is not without its reckonings, and the museum today works with descendant communities on how ancestral remains and cultural objects are cared for and returned.

The fourth floor holds one of the greatest fossil collections anywhere, arranged along an evolutionary path so that walking through the halls is like walking up the tree of life. Towering sauropods, the fanged skulls of tyrannosaurs, and cases of smaller creatures fill room after room, most of them built around real fossil bone rather than casts alone.

The museum was central to the golden age of dinosaur hunting, and many of the great skeletons on display came out of expeditions to the American West and to Mongolia in the early twentieth century. Generations of paleontologists trained here, and the halls have shaped how the whole world pictures the age of dinosaurs.

In the Hall of Ocean Life, a full-size model of a blue whale hangs mid-dive from the ceiling, a favorite meeting spot and one of the most photographed sights in the city. Around it and through the older halls run the famous habitat dioramas, animals mounted before hand-painted backdrops so convincing they seem to open windows onto African plains and North American forests.

Connected to the museum, the Rose Center for Earth and Space houses a great sphere suspended inside a glass cube. Inside the sphere is a planetarium that projects the night sky and the shape of the cosmos, and a spiraling ramp around it walks visitors from the Big Bang to the present, one stride standing in for millions of years.

The museum is too big to see in a day, and trying to do so is the surest way to tire out. Most visitors do best choosing a few halls, the dinosaurs, the whale, the minerals and meteorites, the space show, and leaving the rest for another time. The newest science wing adds a soaring, cave-like atrium and a hall of live butterflies and insects.

It is among the most visited museums in the country, so mornings and weekdays are the calmest times to come. It sits right on Central Park, so a visit pairs naturally with a walk in the park, and the surrounding Upper West Side is full of places to eat before or after.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.